ogether since high school, Mark and
Brenda Moore aren’t just a couple, they’re a
partnership. Rather than finish each other’s
sentences, they expand each other’s thoughts.

They have the kind of respect and intimacy
that all couples strive for. As the saying goes,
they have each other’s back. Sometimes that
looks like pushing someone beyond their
limits; other times it looks like leaving them
alone to think something over.

That became apparent in 2007, whenMark had two strokes at age 46. It happenedon the day before Mother’s Day when he was coaching hisson Markus’s baseball team. “When we got to the practicefield, something was clearly wrong,” Mark said. “Butbecause I was a Type A personality, of course, I went aheadand coached baseball practice.”By the end of practice, he was in bad shape. Within aminute of starting to drive home, he knew he couldn’t makeit. He made an excuse to stop at a card shop for Markus toget a Mother’s Day card. Inside the shop he called Brenda:“Something is really wrong,” he said. She said she’d comeget them, but he told her to call an ambulance instead.Leaning on Markus, they went outside but he could nolonger stand and ended up lying on the sidewalk. He wasconscious when the ambulance arrived.

At the hospital, the initial diagnosis was TIA, but Brenda,who is a nurse, saw things that made her question that. Markseemed uneasy and unfocused and couldn’t speak withher — and “there was swelling in his legs that made mewonder,” she said. She decided to stay with Mark overnight,Two days later, there was a second stroke. Mark’svertebral artery had dissected and was releasing blood,putting pressure on his brain. In order to relieve thatpressure, they had to remove a small piece of his skull.

Of course, Mark knew none of this. After surgery, he wasput into an induced coma for six weeks, and when he cameout, Brenda was right there as she had been every night forthat month and a half. She didn’t sugarcoat his situation:“She said, ‘You’ve had two strokes and you’ve got a longrecovery ahead,” Mark recalled. “It was an absolute shock,and my initial reaction was ‘I don’t want to work that hard.’”Lying in his hospital bed Mark thought, ‘What are youtalking about, let me get some rest? I’ve been in a coma forsix weeks. I’ve had plenty of rest.’ But Brenda and Mark hadbeen together more than 30 years, and she knew he neededtime to digest what she had told him.

All night, Mark was in and out of sleep. And then heremembered something his mother told him when he wasjust a boy growing up in Jamaica, Queens. The Moores werechurch-going people, and his mother told him, “God onlygives you what he knows you can handle.”“I hadn’t thought of that for 35 years,” Mark recalled.“I said to myself, ‘If he’s given this to me, he must thinkI can handle it, and I’ll handle it.’ That was the moment Ibegan to surrender and things changed for me. If I couldhave gotten to my knees and prayed, I would have, butI couldn’t because I couldn’t walk. I simply closed myeyes and asked God to give me the strength to deal withwhatever comes my way.”That prayer itself reflected a big change. As the chiefoperating officer of a multi-million dollar company, and an